This past week I had the great pleasure of starting my own radio show for the first time. It was truly a wonderful experience, and even though I’ve been on the radio a thousand times, this was certainly a totally different kind of adventure! It’s great fun to be able to be on the radio and speak your mind and have total control over which music you play, but it’s critical to keep the pace going, and to keep the listeners tuned in to that radio (or as is often the case now, that computer!) It’s on WPKN.org, for those of you who would like to track it down. They have it archived on the site now, so it can be listened to at any point. I warn you though...it's three hours!

I got to talk a lot of guitar, and we certainly played a lot of great guitar music, since that is the purpose of the show, as well as covering many topics and telling my wild and crazy stories from the road, the studio and from my life in general; especially my life in music. My sidekick on the show is my longtime friend, Roger D., who has seen me through almost all of it, and who started as my student back in 1976, when I lived in my first apartment in Manhattan. He has since that time, almost never missed any show I’ve ever played, and he knows every lick in my library!

I noticed that during my show, the feeling of pacing it and keeping it fresh was a similar feel to being onstage with my band, or even solo. It showed me that I had already learned a lot about this kind of thing from being a performer, and that having something like a radio show becomes an extension of this kind of ability to perform, and to keep an audience interested. I guess it’s like many “hurdles” one has to overcome if one wants to be rather “public”, such as public speaking, singing, or whatever it may be at the time. It’s also a wonderful builder of confidence, and I’d recommend it for anybody. I certainly though, DO recommend that you learn a little engineering too if you want to ever do a radio show, because without our intrepid man turning the dials, and flipping the switches for us, we would’ve been totally lost and frozen in front of those mics!

So maybe one day, you’ll give it a whirl, and you’ll end up on the radio…it’s a blast no matter which side of the microphone you’re on!